GRE Practice Questions

Harriet Monroe, who founded Poetry: A Magazine of Verse in 1912. argued that the more heterogeneous and sprawling the modem world became, the more poetry needed "an entrenched place, a voice of power." Hut this goal could only be realized if poets were valued in ways that encouraged them to participate in the world and made writing verse economically viable. Monroe argued that poets needed sites of institutional opportunity like those that had been developed for visual artists, architects, and musicians. She believed that the hand-wringing anticapitalism dominating genteel literary culture—particularly the idea that poetry ought to be removed from "sordid" pecuniary considerations—brought no economic and only illusory aesthetic benefits, instead severing poets from meaningful participation in the modern world.

The passage suggests that Monroe believed that finding "an entrenched place, a voice of power" for poetry would rely on which of the following?

Scholars generally estimate subscribers to Freedom z Journal (1827-1829), the United States" first African American newspaper, at around 800. based on subscriptions to The Rights of AIL an African American newspaper founded in 1829 as a successor to Freedom s Journal by a former editor of that newspaper But Gross argues that many more than 800 readers probably subscribed to Freedom X Journal because many of its subscribers, dissatisfied with the direction ultimately taken by the paper, refused to subscribe to The Rights of All. In any case, the figure of 800 subscribers would make the circulation of Freedom s Journal close to that of other weekly papers of the time Its number of readers, however, would have been much larger: copies were often shared. and African American organizations subscribed to Freedom s Journal, providing nonsubscribers access to the paper

Which of the following, if true, would most lend to undermine Gross's argument mentioned in the highlighted portion of the passage?

There is a rather________ reason for astronomers sudden interest in comets: most other bodies in the solar system have been explored already.

Some archaeologists speculate that the Americas might have been initially colonized between 40.000 and 25.000 years ago. However, to support this theory it is necessary to explain the absence of generally accepted habitation sites for that time interval in what is now the United States. Australia, which has a smaller land area than the United States, has many such sites, supporting the generally accepted claim that the continent was colonized by humans at least 40.000 years ago. Australia is less densely populated (resulting in lower chances of discovering sites) and with its overall greater aridity would have presented conditions less favorable for hunter-gatherer occupation. Proportionally, at least as much land area has been lost from the coastal regions of Australia because of postglacial sea-level rise as in the United States, so any coastal archaeological record in Australia should have been depleted about as much as a coastal record in the United States. Since there are so many resource-rich rivers leading inland from the United States coastline, it seems implausible that a growing population of humans would have confined itself to coasts for thousands of years. If inhabitants were present 25.000 years ago. the chances of their appearing in the archaeological record would seem to be greater than for Australia.

The passage is primarily concerned with doing winch of the following?

One difficulty in convincing early scientists that craters fanned as a result of impacts from space is that most craters are circular. Impacts could come in at any angle, and experiments firing projectiles in the laboratory show that low-angle impacts lead to elliptical craters, not circular ones. Furthermore, while there was rarely evidence of any impacting object, there was often silicate melt around, suggesting that craters were caused by volcanic processes. The breakthrough in understanding crater origin was the recognition that the shock caused by the impacting object—not the object itself—creates a circular crater some twenty Times larger than the diameter of the impactor. The impact also generates enough heat to largely vaporize the impactor and melt the native rock.

Based on the passage, it can be inferred that research focused on "a classical case of bilingualism"

Even the most complex models used in fishery management are cartoons of reality. They reduce hundreds of links in food webs to a handful and inadequately represent processes operating over space. Many of their assumptions are as flawed today as those of the simplest models of the past. Fish stocks, for one. are still assumed to be populations of a species that are isolated from one another. Yet many populations mix at their edges and some even migrate through areas occupied by other populations. Furthermore, the more complex models suffer from a "crisis of complexity"—more is really less. Adding layers of detail, each carrying its own set of assumptions, produces instability. The model's behavior becomes erratic, and conclusions drawn from it can be downright misleading.

Which of the following can be inferred from the passage about "models of the past"?

The essays in this collection, which explore the adaptation of literary texts to film, all (i)_________the view that the fidelity of film adaptations to their literary precursors is (ii)_________. In fact, the authors of these essays broadly concur that an emphasis on fidelity in film adaptations can be traced to an outmoded academic ideology that insistently prizes the literary in a way that (iii)_________the value of the cinematic.

Until 1992. microprocessor types were identified by number, and for a long time they were considered so _________that manufacturers would share design specifications for them.

Ii is irue lhal science, and more particularly scientists._________cherished paradigms with great reluctance and that when they do. scientific revolutions may result.

Some archaeologists speculate that the Americas might have been initially colonized between 40.000 and 25.000 years ago. However, to support this theory it is necessary to explain the absence of generally accepted habitation sites for that time interval in what is now the United States. Australia, which has a smaller land area than the United States, has many such sites, supporting the generally accepted claim that the continent was colonized by humans at least 40.000 years ago. Australia is less densely populated (resulting in lower chances of discovering sites) and with its overall greater aridity would have presented conditions less favorable for hunter-gatherer occupation. Proportionally, at least as much land area has been lost from the coastal regions of Australia because of postglacial sea-level rise as in the United States, so any coastal archaeological record in Australia should have been depleted about as much as a coastal record in the United States. Since there are so many resource-rich rivers leading inland from the United States coastline, it seems implausible that a growing population of humans would have confined itself to coasts for thousands of years. If inhabitants were present 25.000 years ago. the chances of their appearing in the archaeological record would seem to be greater than for Australia.

The author of the passage notes Australia's "smaller land area" in order to